Daniel was going for days without hearing any other sounds but these. All possible subjects of conversation could be divided into two categories: (1) ones that would cause Drake to unleash a rant, previously heard so many times that Daniel could recite it from memory, and (2) ones that might actually lead to original conversation. Daniel avoided Category 1 topics. All Category 2 topics had already been exhausted. For example, Daniel could not ask, “How is Praise-God doing in Boston?”*because he had asked this on the first day, and Drake had answered it, and since then few letters had arrived because the letter-carriers were dead or running away from London as fast as they could go. Sometimes private couriers would come with letters, mostly pertaining to Drake’s business matters but sometimes addressed to Daniel. This would provoke a flurry of conversation stretching out as long as half an hour (not counting rants), but mostly what Daniel heard, day after day, was corpse-collectors’ bells, and their creaking carts; the frightful Clock; cows; Drake reading the Books of Daniel and of Revelation aloud, or playing the virginal; and the gnawing of Daniel’s own quill across the pages of his notebook as he worked his way through Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens. He actually learned an appalling amount. In fact, he was fairly certain he’d caught up with where Isaac had been several months previously-but Isaac was up at home in Woolsthorpe, a hundred miles away, and no doubt years ahead of him by this point.
He ate down to the bottom of his potatoes and herring with the determination of a prisoner clawing a hole through a wall, finally revealing the plate. The Waterhouse family china had been manufactured by sincere novices in Holland. After James I had outlawed the export of unfinished English cloth to the Netherlands, Drake had begun smuggling it there, which was easily done since the town of Leyden was crowded with English pilgrims. In this way Drake had made the first of several smuggling-related fortunes, and done so in a way pleasing in the sight of the Lord, viz. by boldly defying the King’s efforts to meddle in commerce. Not only that but he had met and in 1617 married a pilgrim lass in Leyden, and he had made many donations there to the faithful who were in the market for a ship. The grateful congregation, shortly before embarking on the Mayflower, bound for sunny Virginia, had presented Drake and his new wife, Hortense, with this set of Delft pottery. They had obviously made it themselves on the theory that when they sloshed up onto the shores of America, they’d better know how to make stuff out of clay. They were heavy crude plates glazed white, with an inscription in spidery blue letters:
Staring at this through a miasma of the bodily fluids of herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day, Daniel suddenly announced, “I was thinking that I might go and, God willing, visit John Wilkins.”
Wilkins had been exchanging letters with Daniel ever since the debacle of five years ago, when Daniel had arrived at Trinity College a few moments after Wilkins had been kicked out of it forever.
The mention of Wilkins did not trigger a rant, which meant Daniel was as good as there. But there were certain formalities to be gone through: “To what end?” asked Drake, sounding like a pipe-organ with numerous jammed valves as the words emerged partly from his mouth and partly from his nose. He voiced all questions as if they were pat assertions: To what end being said in the same tones as You and I are but earth.
“My purpose is to learn, Father, but I seem to’ve learned all I can from the books that are here.”
“And what of the Bible.” An excellent riposte there from Drake.
“There are Bibles everywhere, praise God, but only one Reverend Wilkins.”
“He has been preaching at that Established church in the city, has he not.”
“Indeed. St. Lawrence Jewry.”
“Then why should it be necessary for you to leave.” As the city was a quarter of an hour’s walk.
“The Plague, father-I don’t believe he has actually set foot in London these last several months.”
“And what of his flock.”
Daniel almost fired back, Oh, you mean the Royal Society? which in most other houses would have been a bon mot, but not here. “They’ve all run away, too, Father, the ones who aren’t dead.”
“High Church folk,” Drake said self-explanatorily. “Where is Wilkins now.”
“Epsom.”
“He is with Comstock. What can he possibly be thinking.”
“It’s no secret that you and Wilkins have come down on opposite sides of the fence, Father.”
“The golden fence that Laud threw up around the Lord’s Table! Yes.”
“Wilkins backs Tolerance as fervently as you. He hopes to reform the church from within.”
“Yes, and no man-short of an Archbishop-could be more within than John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom. But why should you embroil yourself in such matters.”
“Wilkins is not pursuing religious controversies at Epsom-he is pursuing natural philosophy.”
“Seems a strange place for it.”
“The Earl’s son, Charles, could not attend Cambridge because of the plague, and so Wilkins and some other members of the Royal Society are there to serve as his tutors.”
“Aha! It is all clear, then. It is all an accommodation. ”
“Yes.”
“What is it that you hope to learn from the Reverend Wilkins.”
“Whatever it is that he wishes to teach me. Through the Royal Society he is in communication with all the foremost natural philosophers of the British Isles, and many on the Continent as well.”
Drake took some time considering that. “You are asserting that you require my financial assistance in order to become acquainted with a hypothetical body of knowledge which you assume has come into existence out of nowhere, quite recently.”
“Yes, Father.”
“A bit of an act of faith then, isn’t it.”
“Not so much as you might think. My friend Isaac-I’ve told you of him-has spoken of a ‘generative spirit’ that pervades all things, and that accounts for the possibility of new things being created from old-and if you don’t believe me, then just ask yourself, how can flowers grow up out of manure? Why does meat turn itself into maggots, and ships’ planking into worms? Why do images of sea-shells form in rocks far from any sea, and why do new stones grow in farmers’ fields after the previous year’s crop has been dug out? Clearly some organizing principle is at work, and it pervades all things invisibly, and accounts for the world’s ability to have newness -to do something other than only decay.”